Thanasis Kritsakis
Michel: Exercises in Mortality
From that place,
as soon as my eyes open,
I can no longer escape.
The only thing is this:
I cannot move without it.
I cannot leave it there where it is,
so that I, myself, may go elsewhere.
I can go to the other end of the world;
I can hide in the morning under the covers.
I can even let myself melt under the sun at the beach –
It will always be there.
Where I am.
It is here, irreparably:
It is never elsewhere.
My body.
Michel Foucault
Michel: Exercises in Mortality is a performance of original dramaturgy that engages with fragments of everyday speech as they emerge within the space of a gym, alongside emblematic texts of Western thought. Drawing on the seminal work Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, it places the body at its core – understood as a site of subjugation and control over the subject. Here, the body emerges as a system of signs, a field of operations – a machine that can be analysed, regulated, and rendered productive through surveillance, exercise, treatment, prevention, aestheticisation, and, ultimately, punishment.
At the same time, the performance turns its gaze towards a wild canvas of present-day exercisers and patients, probing the forces that draw them into spaces of self-regulation: gyms, pharmacies, private clinics, nutrition centres, among others. With nuanced insistence, it asks: What “ritual” does one enact, day after day, to shield the body from pain and decay? How much time – and how much money – is invested in this pursuit? Why does contemporary culture treat death as a failure, while simultaneously developing ever more techniques to prolong life?
Within a dystopian and fiercely competitive stage environment, four exercising citizens are called upon to perform at the limits of their capacity, striving to secure their place within society, within production, within life itself. On this site of endurance and survival, all implicated parties sweat to prove themselves as functional components of a productive system.
Balancing humour with dramatic intensity, the piece – grounded in interview-based material – oscillates between realism, stark fiction, and the surreal, before ultimately returning to a lucid, unvarnished embrace of reality.
Related Events
Duration 90΄
Sychrono Theatro
- 21/07/2026 at 21:30
- 22/07/2026 at 21:00
- 23/07/2026 at 22:00
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Opera | Music | Theatre | Dance | Education | Classical music | Performance | Premiere | Greek Debut
Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus | Little Theatre of Ancient Epidaurus | Peiraios 260 | Odeon of Herodes Atticus | Ancient Stadium Of Epidaurus | Sychrono Theatro | Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus | Exhibition Hall | Theater 104 | The Greek Film Archive Foundation
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